Ratliff tells Gavin Stevens, "about ten years ago Flem and an old man who seemed to be his father appeared suddenly from nowhere one day and rented a little farm from Mr Will Varner who just about owned the whole settlement and district called Frenchman's Bend about twenty miles from Jefferson" (5). Ab is identified as one of the "mad short-tempered barn-burners" (83).

The crowd at the "bleak" railroad station where Labove sees a white man shoot a black man "scatters" as the shooting occurs, then forms a "crowd" around the Negro so dense that Labove has to "use his football tactics" to move through it; some of them also "overpower and disarm" the white man (138).

The descendants of the slaves who once worked on the Old Frenchman's plantation are identified as "saxophone players in Harlem" (375). With this reference the narrative looks ahead both to the Great Migration in which thousands of southern blacks moved to northern cities (which was just beginning at the time the novel takes place) and to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

When describing the graveyard at the Old Frenchman's place, the narrator refers to the slaves buried there as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honkytonks" (375). This reference re-frames the narrative in both time and space, relocating it briefly from Yoknapatawpha in the present (the 1890s) and the past (the antebellum era of slavery) to the New York City of the 1920s, by which time large numbers of southern blacks had moved to the urban North and when jazz was in vogue among both white and black audiences.

The icon represents the group whom Lump Snopes refers to as "a few of the boys" (258). They don't appear directly in the narrative, but Lump tells Mink his plan to take these young white men one night to the home of the Negro who found Mink's shotgun, and terrify him "with a couple of trace chains or maybe a little fire under his feet" in order to force him to admit, falsely, that he stole the gun (258).